While I complained a bit about the Perl being old, sometimes it can be better to learn an older version of a language, especially if it's widely used. Where I work, for some reason they only have Perl 5.6 installed so if I were to use 5.12 or Perl 6, I'd have to deal with even more compatibility issues.

So, you shouldn't have to worry about coding in Python 2.5 - either your stuff will run as backward compatible or you'll have thousands of fellow coders to keep you company as you find out which features are deprecated. Which is an equally useful learning experience with software. :-)

Terry